Part one: What is the best game to come out of the 80s?
Part two: What is the best game to come out of the 90s
This is the third part of the series. This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other decades (10s and 70s) and consoles will come in sporadic subsequent threads.
Expanding on your choice is definitely a plus. I don't think we're gonna get Doom the post this time around.
Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007 and it still slaps. Great balance between twitch-aiming and tactical thinking depending on what class you play. Matchmaking is fine but there's a special place in my heart for joining furry servers and just vibing.
TF2 is still played and accessible which is more than most shooters can say
I have no need to see the community. The game is fun and accessible 15 years later. Any other shooter would just have you killed by better players nearly immediately.
IDK that I could pick a game, but I want to nominate the 00's as possibly the golden age of modding, and the point where gamedev started to become almost democratized and available to the masses.
WC3 has ludicrous amounts of content and spawned multiple whole-ass genres on its own, HL2 and UT2004/3 have plenty of descendants. Dev tools were regularly included with games, PCs and internet becoming ubiquitous made sharing this bounty incredibly easy, but the internet was young enough that we didn't have the always-online shit and DMCA yet that make it so easy for companies to step on us today. This was also about the time that accessible tools started to appear for hacking older console roms (think Lunar Magic), Game Maker and Unity came from this era and have had obvious impacts on the medium (profit model aside, I'm just listing these for the sheer ease they added to making games over the last 20 years)
I bet you're glad that you can pay for all the outfits on good internet now though.
I don't even care for family relationships, I just like placing furniture.
If you have someone to teach you, do that.
If not, there is really no way around a tutorial, youtube or written. It took me like 4 or 5 different attempts at different times before i "got it".
Or just wait until the new UI is done in maybe a year(???).
Max Payne and it's sequel.
Slow motion shooting is now a power up in most shooting games now, both third and first person. It all started here.
Before that game came out, we had never had a real proper third person shooter. Max Payne revolutionized the entire genre. I believe it was also the first shooting game to move away from hitscan style bullets and every weapon had full bullets and tracers. The "bullet time" slow motion effect had you actually dodging bullets and you could see the full buckshot of a shotgun blast with all the bullets firing directly at you.
Max Payne 1 is notable for it's relentless difficulty and can be brutalizing to first time players. Even a veteran player can have a hard time on the lowest difficulty. They don't make games like this where your every move counts and all it takes is one mistake to get killed.
The arsenal of weapons in that game is similar to Doom/Doom II where every weapon has a purpose (even the crappy pistol you start with) and the combat is kinda like a puzzle where it comes down to micromanaging ammo and using the right weapon for certain situations. The Colt Commando however, is the equivalent of Doom's plasma gun and you'll be using it for most of part 3.
I might do a long post on it one day. Been replaying the first game lately and it truly aged well. Max Payne 2 took everything from the first game and expanded upon it, truly polishing up the bullet time combat. The only down side is how easy that game is. Even on Dead On Arrival difficulty, MP2 is such a breeze and the only hard spot is the silly escort mission.
I think Max Payne also was one of the first games that had a fun story to it and proved video games could have story and it work. They mixed Film Noir with Kung Fu action movies. Max himself is just an interesting and fun character. He cracks jokes , he makes funny faces that are memorable (thanks to Sam Lake and the graphic novel panels) and he had a great voice actor who delivered on lines that made it all work. This is everything that Rockstar got wrong with Max Payne 3 and why I will never accept that game as a proper sequel, cause it's not. The 3D Realms Max Payne is the real one.
Minecraft and WoW changed gaming and I'd have to give it to one of them probably.
As much as I love WoW, Minecraft is the biggest reason that we have streaming as it currently exists.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Shadow of the Colossus
Morrowind
Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal
Persona 4
Mother 3
Half-Life 2
Portal
Oblivion
Wind Waker
Cave Story
Fallout: New Vegas
I'd say Half-Life 2. To me it is, for better or worse, the game that pushed the trend to make games more cinematic/immersive. It was also a technical milestone, having much more realistic animations than other games of its time (and even compared to some today) and one of the first where in-game physics is always in play and feels realistic.
I'd also throw in Runescape for its more general cultural impact. Sure, there were more sophisticated MMOs like WoW, EQ, and FFXI, but Runescape introduced a lot of people to MMO games just because of it's barebones barrier to entry. You didn't need to have a "gaming PC" or go to a store to buy it or pay for a monthly subscription, so for a lot of people that was their first experience with MMOs.
Half Life 2 was one of the first games to ever use speech recognition to rig facial animations for NPCs. It was both a minor detail and a revolutionary step forward. All of a sudden, as long as you have a voice actor record a character's dialog, you could see the character speak it with automatic lip syncing. It made everything seem a lot more realistic, and made the characters you bump into seem a lot more like real people instead of just decorations.
Honestly, I would start with Earthbound. Mother 1 is great but it's very... NES RPG which might turn some people off these days.
